The Once and Future Speaker: Nancy Pelosi at 25

It seems like yesterday, but it was Tuesday, April 7, 1987 — the first Tuesday of April, twenty five years ago — that a woman upended a gaggle of veteran San Francisco City Hall politicos and won a close and hard fought election to be the Democratic nominee for the then-Fifth Congressional District of California. It was a bruising primary that gave birth to one of the most powerful female politicians of the last hundred years. It was, of course, the beginning of the Congressional career of Nancy D’Alessandro Pelosi.

I was a volunteer in that first campaign. I stuffed envelopes, painted signs. I learned first-hand the mechanics of voter identification calls and the intricacies of a precinct list. But the turning point to me was an evening, very early in the campaign, when I tagged along with two members of her campaign staff to a local political club that was holding its endorsement meeting to help hand out brochures and buttons. The club, long-known for its political shenanigans at the time, announced peremptorily when we arrived that they had advanced her speaking slot an hour forward, knowing full well that would probably screw with her scheduling. Since I was the only one not known as a “flack” at the time, the staff asked me to represent her — or, more pointedly, to stall while they frantically tried to reach and redirect her (this was, after all, before the invention of the cellphone) to the meeting. I am sure if they had known that my exposure to her and her issues was limited to her campaign brochures and about 17 seconds at a fundraiser, they would have reconsidered. Or maybe not, given they had no alternatives. In any case, I quickly memorized a brochure I had tucked in my pocket, and,when called, began vamping for about three minutes (I’m not sure how many variations of “the voice that will be heard” I worked into my pitch) until I heard the soon-to-be-familiar clatter of heels on a staircase and, to my immense relief, she flashed her smile and worked her way to the front of the room. I quietly retreated and, as she began to speak, became mesmerized and mentally doubled the time I had allotted in my life to volunteer for her campaign. And by the time the campaign was over, I found myself working every evening and every weekend, including being an area captain for five precincts in Bernal Heights on election day.

To this day, I don’t recall exactly what she said as much as how she said it. I just know that I was impressed by her enthusiasm, her knowledge, and her drive. I was dazzled by her smile and her genuine warmth when she came over to thank me for my feeble warm-up act. Whatever it was, whatever she said, it left such a deep and lasting impression that two years later I left a high paying job as an attorney at a large law firm without hesitation to be her local chief of staff. I knew that I wanted to work with and for her, and had known it since that foggy evening in 1987. And from 1989 to 1996 that is exactly what I did.

We worked through the terrible days of the AIDS crisis. The aftermath of the Loma Prieta earthquake. The human rights struggle in China against the Bush Administration. Operation Desert Storm. The base conversions of the Presidio, Hunters Point, and Treasure Island. The election of Bill Clinton, ending a drought of 16 years at the national ballot box. Through her, I met Nelson Mandela and Lech Walesa and students who escaped from Tiananmen Square. More importantly, I met and became friends with thousands of San Franciscans, people joined by their admiration and interest in the work of my boss. Through them, through their eyes, I learned more about what made Nancy special than any campaign commercial, brochure, newspaper article or editorial or talking head could say. And it’s why it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone who knows her that she would rise to where she is today. And anyone who knows her would realize there was no way she was going to go quietly into the night after the Democrats lost the House in 2010; they would know that she would double-down, stay on as Minority Leader, and work twice as hard to regain the Democratic majority in 2012. Because what I saw over two decades ago, and what the people of San Francisco see and her colleagues in Congress experience on a daily basis is, simply, this: she is indomitable, indefatigable, and ever, ever, optimistic. She is tough, she is effective, she knows how to move the gears of government. She is what public officials should be about, and, unfortunately, becomes a rarer and more endangered species with every passing year.

I am, by the way, predicting that she will be Speaker come January, 2013. You read it here.

And thank you, San Francisco, for gifting us with her talents a quarter-century ago.